Ischemic injury to body tissues such as heart, brain, and lung is responsible for a significant amount of mortality and morbidity in both developed and developing countries. Ischemic injury can be induced by events such as myocardial infarction, stroke, and cardiac surgery.
For example, myocardial ischemia can be associated with myocardial infarction. Limitation of infarct size is a major goal of therapy for acute coronary syndromes. Strategies of limiting infarct size have focused on maintaining patency of infarct-related vessels, or providing glucose and insulin to provide necessary metabolic substrates to ischemic tissues. But significant improvement is required in these methods in order to successfully treat events such as myocardial infarction in a large percentage of cases.